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Mandriva is the name of LinuxDistribution published by a French company called MandrivaSoft.

Originally known as Mandrake, they changed the name in 2005 after buying Brazilian distribution Conectiva, thus settling a long-standing court case with the owners of the Mandrake The Magician trademark. Seems some American lawyers couldn't tell the difference between a old comic strip, a modern Linux distro and a plant.

Mandrake was originally forked from RedHatLinux to replace its default GNOME DesktopEnvironment with KDE. Since then, their paths have diverged substantially, with RedHat focusing on enterprise customers with Mandriva catering for both desktop and for server uses. While they're both RPM based, packages for one system will not always work on the other.

Mandriva has a reputation of being good for beginners, although it is a full featured distro. Mandriva aims to provide the latest applications and features. By comparison, some other distros (like Debian stable) take a more conservative approach, sticking with slightly older, more proven applications to give higher certainty of stability.


Part of CategoryDistribution.